About a year ago I scavenged a “to-be-decommissioned” PC out of our closet here at work and installed Ubuntu Server on it. I stuck it under my desk and proceeded to familiarize myself with some administration tasks.
I installed a LAMP stack and moved my web development stuff over to the new box.
Then I set up a bunch of disorganised CRON jobs to back-up all my files.
I installed SAMBA and set about connecting to our Windows Server.
Then I found instructions online about how to connect to a Novell server, so I created a bunch of mount points and wrote a couple scripts to access our Novell server.
doesn't look like much, does it?
Shortly thereafter, I wrote some new scripts to do some routine nightly file maintenance between our Novell network and our Windows network.
I had an old legacy MS Access application that was giving me fits and I wanted to upsize it to something a bit more robust – so I ported it into MySQL.
Then I wrote a web front end for it.
Then I had an idea to create a corporate help-desk application that would allow users to fill out a form online and submit work requests to our department. Simple, but effective.
One day we were overrun with viruses (annoyances, actually) that our current corporate anti-virus wasn’t aware of yet. So I installed Avast Antivirus on the linux box and spent a couple weeks cleaning up flash drives, memory cards and external media of all sorts until the corporate AV got updated with the new virus signatures.
Most recently, I’ve embarked on another we-based front-end to a older application. Sticking it on the web will save tons of money on paper alone.
While modifying my cron jobs to backup the most recent project files, I began to remember this machine’s humble beginnings. Destined for the trash heap, linux breathed new life into an old machine and turned it into a little workhorse.
Eventually, I’m going to need to move my files onto a larger, more secure machine, but I think I’ll keep this little baby around long after that.